unimportant, faceless—but he’d wanted it by his own choice.
Not like this. Never like this.
Passing the nearby B and B on a palm-shadowed, winding path near the beach, he heard soft, peaceful Eastern music. He turned to find its source—and lost his breath.
She stood gracefully on one leg on a towel on the creamy sand beneath a swaying palm tree. The other leg extended back, her arm forward in a balletlike stretch movement. Her hair glowed in the gentle morning light, roped down her back in a simple plait. Barefoot, wearing shorts and a lemon tank top, breasts free of restraint—Don’t go there—her face scrubbed fresh and shower-clean, she resembled the simple, natural girl she’d once been.
And he was gone. The old ache, the helpless longing he always knew when he’d see her waiting for him at the billabong between Eden, his family’s farm, and Poole’s Rest, filled him again.
Mary-Anne had been his since she was six and she’d first seen his face. He’d been hers from the same day, climbing a tree for her against his will, a sulky eight-year-old putting a nest of dead swallow’s eggs back up in the branch to stop her tears for the task she was too chubby and ungainly to perform herself.
Not wanting her then—but wanting to be like her. A timid girl hiding in the shadows of life, she still had the courage to love, to give, never anything but herself. She’d needed him to help with her makeshift hospital of limping wildlife rejects, and he’d needed someone to need him. Just…a friend.
When his feelings changed, he didn’t know.
Maybe when Kathy died of leukemia when he was fifteen? Mary-Anne had left him speechless with gratitude when she’d sneaked through the window into his room the night of the funeral and held him all night in empathetic silence, letting him cry.
The erotic dreams of her started that night, a crazy wildland fire out of control—but, confused and ashamed, he hadn’t called it sexual love for his best friend.
Perhaps he’d known on his eighteenth birthday. His parents, close friends of her parents, had invited her to his private party with just the families, knowing she wouldn’t come to face the town kids’ taunts in a pink fit. Yet, knowing how much it would mean to him if she showed up, she’d stood outside the door and fumblingly handed him his favorite coconut-cream cake. Ginny, rich, pretty, spoiled and his try-hard-wannabe-girlfriend, had seen the pride on his face for his best friend. Spiteful and jealous, she’d said the name Mary-Anne suited her, since she was straight from “Gilligan’s Island.” All the kids laughed, but Ginny couldn’t work out why Tal didn’t. She didn’t know he’d always had a secret crush on the more famous Mary Ann, for being so sweet and kind to dopey Gilligan.
Three months later he’d turned down a major football contract in Sydney—and of all the kids in town, only she understood. “Oh, Tal, I’m so glad I’m not losing you,” she’d whispered…and, seeing her unashamed love for him in her eyes, he’d kissed her for the first time. It was gentle, sweet, awkward and terrifying—a fragile moment of beauty he would never forget. A son of four generations of blunt-talking, hardworking farmers who didn’t know how to communicate, he’d prayed that his touch, his kiss, told her all he could never bring himself to say.
But he’d known he loved her the night his loving, distressed parents and Ginny’s rich, smarmy father, holding the mortgage on Eden and having ambitions for the boy he’d hand-picked to be his son-in-law, had backed him into a corner with two words. “Ginny’s pregnant.” They hadn’t had to say more: they’d known he’d stand by her, even if Ginny had had to find him in a drunken stupor after a college party to seduce him. Well, she’d claimed he’d been enthusiastic, but since his mate Carl had had to carry him back to his dorm, and the remains of his puke had lain on the floor beside the bed, it hadn’t seemed likely.
Years later, Ginny had taunted him with the truth—but he’d never questioned at the time that the baby was his. She’d suckered him, grabbed the chance to get a ring from the boy Daddy had planned for her to marry. The boy she’d known could barely stand her.
As the families planned his wedding, only one thought filled his mind. How the hell do I explain this to Mary-Anne?
He’d given a quiet, unemotional promise to marry Ginny and left them to the champagne Max had brought—refusing to lie or to act happy about it—and he’d run to the tiny billabong, desperately needing comfort. Home from nursing college for the summer, Mary-Anne had come to him—but with tears streaming down her face for what they both knew would be their last time together.
“Ginny’s pregnant,” she’d cried, her pure, clear voice sweet even in her severe distress. “The whole town knows—and they’re all laughing at me. How could you? Why didn’t you make love to me? Why her? I thought…I thought—” She’d broken off then, her face ravaged and white, her eyes dark and burning.
He’d ached to comfort her…and to get comfort himself. Caught like an animal in a trap from one damn time he couldn’t remember. But he’d been in it then, for better or worse. Much worse. “I don’t love her. I—I don’t even like her,” he’d stuttered, desperately needing someone to talk to…aching to hold her, one last time…
“But you slept with her. You gave her your baby.” She’d flung off his touch, his pleading hands. “Go on then, marry her—have your baby—have a nice life with your skinny, pretty wife—but she’ll never love you the way I love you!”
The words he’d always longed for her to say as woman to man, said a day, a week, a year too late, while Ginny listened in from the shadows. Ginny, who’d thought she could cheat and lie to get him, and he’d love her anyway.
Ginny had made him pay for the love he’d only given to Mary-Anne. She and Max had made him pay every hell-filled day of the five years he’d been forced to stay with her, long after their mythical baby returned to the world of fairy tales and any real baby she might have had could have been any guy’s in town.
And Mary-Anne had disappeared into a fairy-tale ending. She’d hooked up to the stars, and dropped his Mary-Anne carelessly in some other galaxy where he’d never find her again.
As if dragged by magnets, he limped over to her now. “Well, I never thought I’d live to see this sight. Mary-Anne Poole is exercising of her own free will.”
“I didn’t lose those sixty pounds by crying in my coffee.” She turned her face to smile at him, sweet and unselfconscious. “And it’s rather hard to keep up a schedule of two hours of dancing and singing almost every night without some basic fitness skills.”
“I thought you famous pop-star types slept ’til midday.”
She smiled at that, too. “You’re still a farmer’s son, why shouldn’t I be a farmer’s daughter?” In a movement shimmering with tranquil beauty, she lifted her arms to a sky alight with the colors of sunrise. A gentle scent of rose and lavender floated to him, filling him with a sense of peace and rest.
“What are you doing?” he asked gruffly, gulping down a ball in his throat at the sight of her effortless grace, the fluid movements of her body. Oh, man, I’m losing it already…
“Tai chi. I finished my yoga a few minutes ago.” She sighed. “I feel like a sloth. I usually do an aerobic dance workout, run five kilometers and do an hour of weights, but I ‘officially’ have a throat infection, so I’m taking a week or two of R and R.”
He shook his head, laughing. “Mary-Anne
